Category: Christmas

It doesn’t rain much these days.
And when it’s warm winter, there’s not much snow melting from the mountains.
The rivers run dry, and the lake retreats from the shore.
We drive the lake bed, throwing trash in the back of the truck.
Broken rowboats, old tires, car parts and other junk.
Scrap is scrap.
And that’s when we found the barrel with the body in it.
“He drowned,” said the coroner, ignoring the three bullets.
“But-”
“He drowned,” repeated the coroner.
He said that about every body we brought in.
And, eventually, us, when we wouldn’t stop asking questions.

They say that it’s the season for miracles.
And after years of not believing, finally, I believe.
The greatest story ever told, they say.
Well, Frank Key of Hooting Yard told them all.
On Resonance Radio.
Brilliant nonsense, week after week.
Tales of the strange and bizarre.
After his death, his website vanished.
His books and pamphlets no longer in print.
And the archives at Resonance Radio unreliable at best.
Then, after so much silence, a voice from the dead.
A lost episode, published to his feed.
A Christmas miracle.
Thank God I’m too lazy to prune my podcast subscriptions.

I’ve seen some posts online that say a pet is a fifteen year responsibility.
I guess those people get a pet, mark their calendar fifteen years in advance, and if the pet is alive then, they dump it off at a shelter or by the side of the road.
Baby chicks for Easter, well, they’re just chickens.
Same goes for fish.
Sure, they have some intelligence and emotion to them, like any animal, but not that much.
But a dog or cat for Christmas…
They have emotions, and abandonment and rejection are cruel.
Oh, and chickens and fish taste good.

What were my holidays like?
Well, being Jewish, we didn’t write letters for Santa or go to the mall to sit in his lap.
Still, we looked through the Sears catalog and picked out what we’d want for Hanukkah.
They’d buy some of it, wrap it, and hide it.
If we tried to find out where they hid it, or didn’t like our gifts, they’d give everything away to charity.
Or burn it in the driveway.
In a pile of all of our other things.
One year, I didn’t ask for anything.
They burned my stuff in the driveway anyway.

The day after Christmas, Uncle Billy sobered up and remembered what happened to the deposit.
“I think it was in the newspaper that Mr. Potter took from me,” he said.
George called Bert the policeman, and auditors went through Potter’s books and the contents of the bank’s vault.
“Eight thousand over,” said the bank examiner. He turned to Potter. “Can you explain this?”
Potter’s lawyers tried to, but they watched their client being rolled out of the bank into custody.
“Thank goodness that’s been solved,” said Billy.
“You’re fired,” said George, as the townspeople began to demand their money back.

What were Audrey Hepburn’s last words.
“Think of me when you wear them,” she said.
She’d bought winter coats for her family.
Gifts for their last Christmas together.
There in Switzerland on a cold Winter’s day.
She was dying from cancer.
Cancer of the appendix.
She’d never had it taken out.
An organ that’s useless… and it becomes worse than useless.
It becomes deadly.
Could she have had it taken out when she was younger?
Not really.
World War 2. The Dutch Resistance.
And the terrible famines.
Hollywood stars get vanity facelifts and tummy tucks, and breast implants, not appendectomies.

There’s an aisle at the grocery store that changes with the seasons.
In the months before Halloween, it’s stocked from top to bottom with candy and decorations.
Then, a few days before Halloween, the last dregs of candy and the ugliest decorations nobody wants are put on clearance on one shelf, and the Christmas stuff is stocked.
A few days before Christmas, it’s down to the dregs of decorations, and the Valentines candy and stuffed bears are stocked.
Then it’s St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, and back to school supplies.
Until it’s time for Halloween.

When I order something from Amazon, I pray that they deliver it themselves.
My instructions for Amazon’s deliveries tell them to leave the packages inside the back gate.
Things don’t get stolen from there.
If they leave it at the front door, people might steal it.
UPS and Fedex always leave things at the front door. And don’t always ring the doorbell.
And when it’s handed to the Post Office for the last mile, well, they steal it themselves.
Especially when the delivery is over a holiday weekend.
In the end, it’s just easier to go to a goddamned store.

There’s no worse gift than socks.
They’re worse than sweaters and underwear.
When I got socks as a gift, I made sock puppets.
And I would put on plays where the puppets lamented about how crappy they were as gifts.
With practice, I got really good at sock puppetry.
Even if it was all on the street corner.
Still, I earned quite a bit of money from these puppet plays.
I saved up my coins and put them in the socks to use as a sap on the asshole aunts and grandparents who gave me these socks as a gift.

The job is simple.
Scan the brain, copy the brain, and upload it in the database.
Then we dump the body down the chute.
That’s all we do. Nothing else.
It doesn’t matter who it is.
No selfies, no writing things on the body.
Nothing funny.
Scan, copy, upload, and dump.
Under no circumstances are you to lay on the table and scan yourself.
No copies, no uploads.
And, for God’s sake, don’t go down the chute.
Last year, after the Christmas Party, a guy did that.
Instead of downloading him, the company just deleted his file from the database.